It's time to rediscover the Woodman Institute Museum

DOVER — Have you ever wondered where the phrase “sleep tight” came from? How about, “You can't eat dessert until you clean your plate”? And what does a “square meal” really mean?

These questions can be answered at the Woodman Institute Museum, nestled near the heart of the Garrison City on Central Avenue, where you tour a garrison house built in Dover in 1685 and catch a glimpse of a man-eating clam caught off the Australian coast.

Yes, all this, in just one museum.

Thom Hindle, who after 15 years as a trustee became the museum's curator this year, said so many residents overlook the museum, driving by every day and never really taking the time to peak in and see what the place is all about.

He said many people bring their grandchildren and are amazed to find how many new items have been brought into the 19th century-style museum since they visited when they were in grade school.

Every year Hindle brings in a new exhibit and spends the winter months, when the museum is closed, updating and making changes to existing exhibits.

Years ago, he even climbed in the taxidermy displays of birds and wildlife animals from years and years ago to clean up the stages the original curator, Melville Smith, had created.

“He must have been happy with what we did,” Hindle said. Ever since the clean up, the infamous sound of foot steps that once continuously walked up and down the second floor hall of the museum where the birds are located have stopped and are no longer heard.

When the museum reopens on April 3, a bottling exhibit will be available to view. Bottles from Dover from hundreds of years ago are in the collection, from Coca-Cola and whisky to medicine, oysters, orange soda and milk jugs.

The 10-foot tall polar bear, killed by a Dover man near the Siberian coast in 1969 will always be a focal point at the Woodman, but many people do not know that just around the corner from the tall, white bear is a 27-pound lobster, a blue shark caught off the coast of Ogunquit, Maine and the last cougar ever killed in New Hampshire, back in 1853 in Lee.

The Woodman also has one of the largest mineral collections north of Boston, with over 1,300 rocks and minerals on display.

“We've very unique, very eclectic,” Hindle said of the Woodman. “We're natural science, local history and art, basically three museums in one.”

Hindle said it can take days to actually absorb all that is in the museum, and he is not kidding.

My tour began in the center courtyard of the museum, where the Woodman itself, along with the Hale House and the William Dunn garrison house were in full view. In front of me was one of the ten “Napoleon” Civil War cannons, complete with its original caisson. The batteries from this cannon were what stopped Gen. Pickett's infamous charge at Gettysburg.

An oversized skeleton key unlocked the cover protecting the 1685 garrison house. Stepping through the home made of eight-inch thick logs was, excuse the cliché, like stepping back in time.

The exterior was built so thick in order to keep arrows and bullets from going through the logs.

The house was used as a defensive home, in case of an Indian attack, right here in Dover near where the Garrison Elementary School sits today.

To the left when first walking into the home, visitors can spot a heart carved out of the wood by the doorway.

According to Hindle, the entryway was once boarded up for extra protection, with doors that had to be opened to let people inside the kitchen on the left and the living room on the right.

Because it was so dark with the closed doors, occupants would generally make a hole in the wall to let in light from the fireplace.

“And if you were newlyweds or if it was your first home, a heart was carved sometimes,” Hindle said.

The original authentic fortified garrison was built out in the Back River Road section of Dover and today is still in 70-percent of its original form. A new fireplace was installed in the 1700s when the residents realized having an open fireplace that could be viewed from both the kitchen and the living room on the opposite side was not efficient — the heat went right up the chimney.

“It would be so cold in here buckets of water would freeze,” Hindle said. “I read a journal where a man wrote that his pen ink was freezing it was so cold in here.”

Over 800 items illustrate Dover's history in the house from kitchen utensils, furniture, tools, looms and rope beds. These items were, for the most part, collected by a Dover woman, Ellen Rounds, who helped bring the house to the museum when it first opened in 1916.

It took 10 days to get the house to the museum. It was rolled on logs down the road.

Today, people can view the wooden trenches that were once used as plates. These trenches were carved out of wood and made square, hence, “a square meal.” They had to be cleaned with bread so that dessert could be served on the other side, coming up with the phrase, “You cannot have dessert until you clean your plate,” because, literally, you had to clean your plate out so you could turn it over to have dessert.

Upstairs in the garrison is where people slept. The mattresses, sacks filled with field hay and straw, sat on ropes. After tossing and turning, Hindle said people would use a rope wrench to twist and tighten the ropes every couple of weeks.

“Tight ropes, tight bed, or, basically, sleep tight,” he said.

Other furniture pieces are also on display at the museum in the Hale House, a home built by John Williams in 1813, who started the Dover Cotton Factory in 1812. John Parker Hale, a former U.S. Senator and abolitionist moved into the home in 1840. His daughter, Lucy, was the fiancee of President Abraham Lincoln's assassinator, John Wilkes Booth.

Lincoln's podium used during a speech he gave in Dover and the saddle he sat on shortly before being assassinated are also on display at the Woodman Institute Museum.

Downstairs in the Hale House, Dover history, from water buckets that once hung by the front door of each residence to assist in fires throughout the community, to old toys, dolls and eyeglasses, are on display. As you climb the stairs once used by President Franklin Pierce and Daniel Webster, you will discover a room that used to hold formal parties. A Civil War era music box still plays in a room full of furniture made in Dover, Portsmouth and Newburyport. The desk of Jeremy Belknap, the man who wrote sermons in Dover and the first history of New Hampshire, also sits inside the Hale House, complete with a feather pen.

After viewing these pieces of history, hearing the stories of past Dover residents, even spotting a meteorite that had landed in China in 1516, it was easier to attempt to imagine what my life would be like if I had lived in these past centuries. I started to picture what it would have felt like to have woken up at dawn to chop trees, husk and shave corn and search for and use giant leaves to bake bread so it would not stick to a metal pan. I thought about how it would have felt to freeze through the winter, live through wars shown in the exhibit and even hide under a desk during an atomic bomb test at school. The list goes on and on and it is all in the Woodman Institute Museum. It is all available for people to see starting again on April 3 for $8 a visit.

“It is such a significant museum,” Hindle said, and as the brochure says, come and “discover us again for the first time.”

The Woodman Institute Museum is located at 182 Central Avenue. For more information, call 603-742-1038, visit http://woodmaninstitutemuseum.org or email contact@woodmaninstitutemuseum.org.